Finally! Intel is letting us publish our performance results for their new Arc A Series graphics cards. We have three reviews for you today: Intel Arc A770 (this review), Intel Arc A750, and Arc A770 Performance with PCI-Express 3.0 and/or Resizable Bar Disabled.

Intel Arc A770 16 GB Limited Edition is the Intel flagship card for this generation, and the equivalent of the "Founders Edition". The card is designed by Intel to very high standards, as we've seen in our teardown. With their new ACM-G10 GPU, the company goes beyond what the ACM-G11 on the Arc A380 offered. Instead of just 1024 cores on the A380, you now get up to 4096 GPU cores on the A770, which is on par with offerings from AMD and NVIDIA (RX 6600 XT = 2048 cores, RTX 3060 = 3584 cores), even though comparing such units 1:1 isn't always precise—but that's what we have our reviews for.

Averaged over our updated 25-game-strong test suite at 1080p resolution, the Arc A770 reaches performance that's comparable to NVIDIA's RTX 3060, slightly faster than RTX 2070, RX 6600 and RX 5700 XT. AMD's Radeon RX 6600 XT is 9% faster, the RTX 2080 is 16% ahead, and the RTX 3060 Ti is 25% faster. This places the A770 right in the midrange segment of the GPU market—this is where the majority of sales are happening. Most people are happy spending $250-$350 on their graphics card, and Intel's offerings are right spot-on to target that crowd. This also means that there's fierce competition here.

Once you increase the gaming resolution to 1440p, the Arc A770 gains on its competitors. It's now 10% faster than RTX 3060, slightly faster than RX 6600 XT and only 17% behind the RTX 3060 Ti. It seems that Intel A700 Series GPUs scale better with resolution than the other cards in our test group. While this trend continues at 4K, I don't think the A770 (or RTX 3060 / RX 6600 XT) is fast enough for 4K, which makes the comparison irrelevant. The Arc A770 is a great card for 1080p Full HD gaming at maximum details, and 1440p runs well enough on most titles, too. There's two or three games in which you have to dial down the settings a bit, but that's ok.

All these tests were with ray tracing disabled, and that's what you should be looking for when shopping in the midrange segment. Sprinkling RT effects on top of your game graphics comes with a serious performance hit—making little sense when you're running around 60-80 FPS, even with RT disabled. We still tested ray tracing and I'm happy to report that Intel's ray tracing implementation is great. I didn't encounter any serious issues, crashes or rendering errors, which is quite a feat for such a new technology. Technologically, Intel is clearly ahead of current-gen AMD, which can be seen in the performance benchmarks. NVIDIA's cards are still a little bit better. Both AMD and NVIDIA are releasing their next-gen graphics cards this quarter however, so things will change soon.

Taking a closer look at our individual benchmarks, it looks like DirectX 11 performance is the most challenging task for Intel. In many of these tests, performance is considerably lower than on AMD/NVIDIA, which suggests Intel needs more driver optimizations here. Even a company as big as Intel has only limited resources, and it makes perfect sense to focus on the newest, most popular titles first, and then improve driver support for older games. Still, people play older games, and for this crowd I would definitely recommend a GPU from the other two manufacturers, simply because they have been around for so long that older games got optimizations back when they were released. I reviewed the Intel Arc A380 two months ago, and encountered numerous software issues and bugs. Pretty much all of these issues have been fixed and the various software components feel much more mature. They are still not 100% perfect and there's still many things that can be improved, but there are no more showstoppers (that I encountered). This is proof that Intel's software team is firing on all cylinders, resolving issues non-stop—good job Intel!

Intel Arc is the only graphics card in its segment to support hardware-accelerated AV1 encoding, and it's the first graphics card with native DisplayPort 2.0. This makes the A750 and A770 formidable beasts for high-resolution video creator workloads, given the dual-media engines (two independent media streams can be encoded simultaneously at 100% performance). DisplayPort 2.0 means that you can connect these with 8K+HDR displays or build premium, future-proof HTPCs with them. AV1 is on course to replacing HEVC as the preeminent online video format, since it's royalty-free. YouTube is integrating AV1, while Netflix plans to make it their main video format. On the other hand, all these content delivery platforms will offer fallbacks to older codecs for the foreseeable future, so this is not an essential capability at this time.

Intel contracted TSMC to fabricate their new GPU, because TSMC is the only company in the world that has a currently working 6 nanometer production process for desktop-class processors. Such a small process promises great energy efficiency, yet the A770 clearly falls behind the current-gen offerings from AMD and NVIDIA in terms of efficiency. RX 6600 XT is 25% more efficient, RTX 3060 Ti is 22% better. Intel Arc Alchemist rather seems to be on the same efficiency level as older cards like RX 5700 XT and RTX 2070—a bit disappointing. Looking at our voltage-frequency tests, and V-Sync power consumption, it seems that Intel simply doesn't have all the refined power-saving technologies yet that the competitors developed over the decades. I think that's also the reason for the very high non-gaming power consumption. With over 40 W in idle, sitting at the desktop doing nothing, power consumption in that scenario is 3x as high as on the competitors—which can become a dealbreaker if you're running your PC a lot of hours each day. Gaming power draw is a bit on the high side with 230 W, but nothing that any decent PSU can't handle.

XeSS is a seriously evolved piece of technology, and we can't believe Intel got it so right at their first attempt. It is technologically better than FSR 1.0, and seems to be on par with DLSS 2 and FSR 2.0, since we're seeing comparable image quality at comparable performance gains. We've tested XeSS last week on the RTX 3060, and we have to say that the feature truly comes to life with Arc GPUs, thanks to the XMX-optimized code. On other GPUs, it uses a DP4a (industry standard) codepath, which comes with drawbacks in terms of performance and image quality, so only Intel Arc GPUs will get you the best image quality. Intel has a formidable footprint among ISVs (game developers), and with XeSS being as easy to integrate as AMD FSR and DLSS, adoption rates should be good. On the other hand, now game developers have to integrate three upscaling solutions, which means less love for each of them.

Overclocking of our card worked well, no more software issues. I also have to praise Intel for including their own overclocking software, unlike NVIDIA, which basically forces you to use 3rd party apps. We were able to run it at 2.6 GHz stable, which unfortunately yielded only a 6% performance improvement. Memory overclocking is not available on this generation of Intel graphics cards. We confirmed with Intel that they will add memory overclocking on future products: "For this generation we focused on enabling GPU overclocking. We will be looking at memory overclocking with the next generation."

Intel is pricing the Arc A770 16 GB at $350, there's also a 8 GB card for $330. Given our performance results you will definitely be fine with the 8 GB version, but the price difference is quite small, and I feel that the higher resale value will offset the initial savings eventually. At $350 the Arc A770 is priced fairly, but not nearly as aggressively as it has to be for huge success. You can buy the Radeon RX 6600 XT for $300—it'll be a bit faster on average, with much more mature drivers and higher energy efficiency. Also, strong options are RX 6600 for $250 and RX 6650 XT for $300. On the NVIDIA side there's RTX 3060 for $370, and RTX 3060 Ti for $450, a bit expensive, but very refined in terms of software, compatibility and features. What will certainly sweeten the deal is that Intel is bundling Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (2022) with all cards, at $70 value.

Still, given what the Arc A770 currently offers, I feel like Intel needs to price the A770 around $300 to see mass adoption rates. Another obstacle could be availability. While Intel has a great channel network and their products can be found worldwide, I think that custom-designs always add more interesting options to the lineup. At this time we haven't seen a big push from board partners, but that might happen in the near future. There's also rumors that Intel might cancel their GPU project, which makes little sense now that they have proven that they can release a solid product. The momentum is also on their side. Dear Pat, please give us more Intel GPUs, the investment will be worth it.